This year’s World Disasters Report focuses on the rapid spread of technologies, especially information and communication technologies, which is changing humanitarian action and humanitarians, too. It finds that the changes are most evident in highly technological environments, such as megacities, or when disasters affect critical infrastructures, resulting in secondary technological disasters, such as nuclear power plant accidents. Technology also enables affected communities to quickly transform themselves into first responders, send requests and messages, provide critical information, match assistance needs with providers or support rapid damage assessments. This is also the case in rural areas around the world, which are increasingly connected and have access to information and communication resources that are unprecedented.
The development of a more technology-oriented approach to humanitarian action is essential – and inescapable – to take advantage of the opportunities to improve, for example, information gathering, analysis, coordination, action or fund-raising. This report presents examples where technologies already contribute to humanitarian action, often with the result of putting affected communities at the centre of humanitarian action as engaged participants and not merely as witnesses or recipients of aid.
The report’s main findings are the following:
- Tools that foster data gathering and communication with affected communities are very rapidly expanding. These include crowdsourcing, big data analytics, crisis mapping and digital data collection. Communication among affected communities, and between communities and outside actors, is easier than before, enabling them to organize, coordinate and respond to their own problems.
- To understand the local information ‘ecosystem’, responders need to determine what technologies and platforms might be useful before, during and after disasters, as well as to understand the local environment. Responders will also need to foster coherent communication with local communities in need, by linking up with the people affected by the crisis, local media, government, business and civic groups, and by listening to how people on the ground are communicating with each other.
- What matters is communication, while the choice of tools is secondary. New media may not always be more appropriate. It is also important to avoid using technologies in post-emergency settings in ways that exacerbate inequalities and create divisions based on levels of technology and access to information. This further points to the need to ‘keeping it simple’. Communicating via radio, print and even word of mouth remains highly efficient. Getting the message out in a disaster should use all available means. Ultimately, the best way to create empowerment and resilience within disaster-affected communities is by investing in developing the capacity of community members to be the responders and organizers of their own relief.
- Challenges include communicating with and empowering disaster-affected communities, ensuring data-driven decision-making, opening up closed, potentially life-saving data and developing strong protocols for data protection in the network age.
- The usefulness of new forms of information gathering is limited by the awareness of responders that new data sources exist, and their applicability to existing systems of humanitarian decision-making. Humanitarian decision-making processes are often not based on empirical data in the first place, even when that data originate from traditional sources. Even when good data is available, it is not always used to inform decisions. There are a number of reasons for this, including data not being available in the right format, not widely dispersed, not easily accessible by users, not being transmitted through training and poor information management. Also, data may arrive too late to be able to influence decision-making in real time operations or may not be valued by actors who are more focused on immediate action.
- Among some human rights researchers and advocates, big data has been described as the biggest-ever threat to human rights. There is much truth to this statement and the humanitarian space is certainly not immune to the serious data privacy and protection challenges that big crisis data pose. That said, concern over the protection of information and data is not a sufficient reason to avoid using new communications technologies in emergencies, but it must be taken into account. To adapt to increased ethical risks, humanitarian responders and partners need explicit guidelines and codes of conduct for managing new data sources.
- In response to the proliferation of both information and crises, the possibility arises of using technology to crowd-source not only the mapping of relief needs, but also the distribution of relief itself. By its very nature, humanitarian aid has always been crowd-sourced – through family, friends, neighbours, tribesmen and fellow believers. But institutionalizing crowdsourcing of aid distribution is problematic. First, it might lead agencies or donors to abdicate responsibility for responding to less ‘sexy’ crises. Second, skilled and trained V&TC volunteers are a scarce and unstable resource – and not trained or prepared to operate in war and disaster zones.
Appropriate implementation of the innovation, evaluation and diffusion processes requires being responsive to disaster situations by matching the approach to the needs, constraints and opportunities available. In a time of financial crisis and renewed focus on humanitarian accountability, assessment of trade-offs, costs and resources must be measured against benefits of investing in technology for humanitarian actions. Ultimately, the most important benefits are the reduction of suffering, preservation of family stability and human dignity, and prevention of lives lost. Whether or not humanitarian technology contributes to these objectives must be rigorously evaluated.